M5 Bus : Mashup

I’ve wanted to try another geocode mashup since the Where We Were project I ran at Moore College. I recently picked up a GPS unit, which got me thinking about it anew.

For the M5 Bus trip assignment for our Applications class I worked up a mix of Twitter, GPS location, digital photos and Google Maps. I had previously synchronized the clocks for the camera, phone and TomTom GPS unit…and used these timestamps later to literally mash the Twitter XML and TomTom GPX files together with a custom Java application. Geocoding the photographs was done using the gpsdings java application.

Google Maps will display carefully formed KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files, which is nice because Google Earth can open the same file.

The project is available at http://robertcarlsen.net/m5. Although this entry is focused specifically on the technical side, I welcome comments here on the thoughts presented on the project page.